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Actually, I think it is fine as it is ... if people think it is useful then they should apply it to articles... but in case some people disagree, I have created a template to deal with the situation...

Who cares if the template is being considered for deletion? Nobody wants to see that on the article pages. The only people who should care are the ones who take care of the template. The article editors can remove the template themselves in case it gets deleted. I suggest that a <noinclude> tag be place on the tfd message. Diez2 16:29, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Except that's not what's done for every single other template up for deletion? The message is placed there precisely to alert users of the template that it's up for deletion and not just the "caretakers." Since, you know, users might be affected by suddenly having a template disappear beneath them for no apparent reason. SnowFire 18:01, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

I am thinking about renominating this template for deletion. It refers to an essay page, not a policy or guideline, and thus basically amounts to a non-policy opinion. Alternatively, I would find changing the instructions so as to dictate the placement of this template on the article talk page to be an acceptable solution. Yworo (talk) 17:13, 24 February 2010 (UTC)

I disagree. While the tag links to the WP:RECENTISM essay, the problem of recentism itself is part of WP:NPOVpolicy, which explicitly forbids recentism. The tag is a useful means of identifying problems for editors to correct when the problem is not immediately rectifiable with a quick edit. See WP:TAGGING. THF (talk) 05:09, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

I stand by my comment made three years ago in the deletion discussion - there theoretically are times where this template is appropriate, but it's misused about 95% of the time. The most common misuse of the template is a reverse "expand" template - rather than asking for expansion of historical sections, the recentism template is placed on a comprehensive section on recent events, implying that Wikipedia should reduce its coverage there rather than expand its coverage of the historical area. (Or perhaps some misguided sense of "fairness" that all parts of the article must develop at the same rate.)

To give a concrete example, a "recentism" tag was placed on Jacmel, Haiti a few days after the earthquake. Now the Jacmel article was pretty stubby and short before the earthquake, but with the sudden surge of news and interest it'd been expanded. Thing is, the expansion on the earthquakes and its aftereffects were 100% relevant - it was a major event in the history of the town, killed people, screwed with plans to bring luxury hotels there, etc. If Jacmel ever became a featured article, a significant section of the featured version would surely cover the earthquake. So... the "problem," if any, wasn't with the comprehensive section on the earthquake, but rather the relative paucity of information on the town in history. So why complain about the earthquake coverage? Slap the article with an expand tag, but even that seems meh, Wikipedia is a volunteer project and who knows when someone with good sources on the history of the town will come along. But slashing the recent coverage to be equally sparse wouldn't help anything. The same thing happens whenever a notable person with a sparse article hits the news - the news attracts attention, which expands that section, which then often attracts a misguided "recentism" tag over "but why aren't this person's other accomplishments earlier covered?"

To me, a recentism template is only valid when a topic is being skewed by recent events, rather than merely comprehensively covering them. For example, the stingray article had editors adding prominent mention of Steve Irwin's death shortly thereafter. Would a real stingray article pick one specific person to highlight? Or say that the article was rewritten to highly play up stingray attacks on humans and it blathered on about that at great length, unlike other articles on animals. These are clearly changes that are only happening due to recent events and would look out-of-place if read even a year later. While simple removal / reversion / moving to a correct article is obviously the best choice, a recentism template would be appropriate in such a circumstance.

Anyway, I rather doubt another deletion discussion would work, but if you're up for it, Yoworo, I do recommend attempting to occasionally "clean" the uses of the template. Just remove it from the most egregious cases of misuse; I think that's a lot more likely to succeed. SnowFire (talk) 16:27, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

IMHO, right now, a {{recentism}} tag would be entirely appropriate on the Jacmel article, which contains a surfeit of unencyclopedic play-by-play sentences like "On the 29th, Choice Hotels announced that it would continue with its plans to open two hotels in Jacmel, although opening would be delayed. The 32-room hotel that will be converted into a Comfort Inn was not damaged in the quake". THF (talk) 23:52, 25 February 2010 (UTC)

Not featured prose perhaps but IMHO entirely relevant material for a town which relies on tourism. To test if something is recentism, just shift the statement in time and see if it still belongs. Take a hypothetical article about a small town in Pennsylvania with a big steel mill as the base of the economy that suffered a fire in 1932. No matter what happened afterward, whether it be A) The company declared it intended to stand by the factory or B) The factory was closed and a big wave of unemployment and depopulation followed, it'd be relevant to mention. Of course eventually that Hotel sentence will be converted into what the company *did* rather than announced but I don't see a problem. The only possible argument is that the hotel is too minor compared to my "company town's factory" example, and, well, that's not a problem of recentism. (For example, I picked a town known for tourism at random... look at Key West, Florida#Attractions.2C_events.2C_recreation.2C_and_culture , which isn't templated, you'll see. If it did get templated it'd be templated for being badly written and listy. Hardly a problem unique to articles on topics covered by recent events.) SnowFire (talk) 04:39, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

The weighting of minor events that occurred recently over more notable events that occurred less recently is exactly what recentism is all about. Hard to see how a 32-room budget hotel is notable. THF (talk) 04:52, 26 February 2010 (UTC)

Exactly. And if you think that's an egrecious example, try reading a current sportsperson biography. Not unusual for 60% of an article to be a running commentary on a person's current season regardless of weight relative to the rest of his career. Chris Cunningham (not at work) - talk 13:30, 2 March 2010 (UTC)